The Urantia Book-- Part III. The History Of
UrantiaPAPER 100: Section 1.
Religious Growth

P1094:3,100:1.1
While religion produces growth of meanings and enhancement of values, evil
always results when purely personal evaluations are elevated to the levels
of absolutes. A child evaluates experience in accordance with the content
of pleasure; maturity is proportional to the substitution of higher meanings
for personal pleasure, even loyalties to the highest concepts of diversified
life situations and cosmic relations. P1094:4,100:1.2
Some persons are too busy to grow and are therefore in grave danger of spiritual
fixation. Provision must be made for growth of meanings at differing ages,
in successive cultures, and in the passing stages of advancing civilization.
The chief
inhibitors of growth are prejudice and ignorance. P1094:5,100:1.3
Give every developing child a chance to grow his own religious experience;
do not force a ready-made adult experience upon him. Remember,
year-by-year
progress through an established educational regime does not necessarily mean
intellectual progress, much less spiritual growth. Enlargement of vocabulary
does not signify development of character. Growth is not truly indicated by
mere products but rather by progress. Real educational growth is indicated
by enhancement of ideals, increased appreciation of values, new meanings of
values, and augmented loyalty to supreme values. P1094:6,100:1.4
Children are permanently impressed only by the loyalties of their adult associates;
precept or even example is not lastingly influential. Loyal persons are growing
persons, and growth is an impressive and inspiring reality. Live loyally today
-- grow -- and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole
to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole.

P1094:7,100:1.5
The soil essential for religious growth presupposes a progressive life of
self-realization, the co-ordination of natural propensities, the exercise
of curiosity and the enjoyment of reasonable adventure, the experiencing of
feelings of satisfaction, the functioning of the fear stimulus of attention
and awareness, the
wonder-lure, and a normal consciousness of smallness, humility.
Growth is also predicated on the discovery of selfhood accompanied by self-criticism
-- conscience, for conscience is really the criticism of oneself by one's
own
value-habits, personal ideals.

P1095:1,100:1.6
Religious experience is markedly influenced by physical health, inherited
temperament, and social environment. But these temporal conditions do not
inhibit inner spiritual progress by a soul dedicated to the doing of the will
of the Father in heaven. There are present in all normal mortals certain innate
drives toward growth and self-realization which function if they are not specifically
inhibited. The certain technique of fostering this constitutive endowment
of the potential of spiritual growth is to maintain an attitude of wholehearted
devotion to supreme values. P1095:2,100:1.7
Religion cannot be bestowed, received, loaned, learned, or lost. It is a personal
experience which grows proportionally to the growing quest for final values.
Cosmic growth thus attends on the accumulation of meanings and the ever-expanding
elevation of values. But nobility itself is always an unconscious growth.
P1095:3,100:1.8
Religious habits of thinking and acting are contributory to the economy of
spiritual growth. One can develop religious predispositions toward favorable
reaction to spiritual stimuli, a sort of conditioned spiritual reflex. Habits
which favor religious growth embrace cultivated sensitivity to divine values,
recognition of religious living in others, reflective meditation on cosmic
meanings, worshipful problem solving, sharing one's spiritual life with one's
fellows, avoidance of selfishness, refusal to presume on divine mercy, living
as in the presence of God. The factors of religious growth may be intentional,
but the growth itself is unvaryingly unconscious. P1095:4,100:1.9
The unconscious nature of religious growth does not, however, signify that
it is an activity functioning in the supposed subconscious realms of human
intellect; rather does it signify creative activities in the superconscious
levels of mortal mind. The experience of the realization of the reality of
unconscious religious growth is the one positive proof of the functional existence
of the superconsciousness.